South Africans are regularly invited to participate in public consultations. Government departments request comments on proposed policies, parliament invites submissions on legislation, regulators publish discussion documents and municipalities convene meetings on budgets and development plans. These processes create the appearance of participatory democracy. Yet many of the most consequential public choices are expressed through a language that is inaccessible to much of the population.Terms such as fiscal consolidation, debt sustainability, expenditure ceilings, contingent liabilities, localisation thresholds, market confidence, cost recovery and labour market flexibility are often presented as though their meaning and consequences are self-evident. For many citizens, they are not.The recent controversy over the withholding of equitable share transfers from municipalities illustrates the problem. Public debate quickly became dominated by references to financial misconduct, constitutional enforcement, unfunded budgets, creditor-payment arrangements and compliance requirements. These issues matter. Municipal financial mismanagement is serious, and public officials must be held accountable for the misuse of public resources. But for residents worried about whether water will continue running, refuse will be collected or municipal employees will be paid, the technical language surrounding the decision offered little meaningful access to the debate.The central issue is not whether financial accountability should be abandoned. It is whether people affected by public decisions are given enough accessible information to understand, question and evaluate those decisions.This problem is not limited to people without tertiary education. Lawyers, engineers, health professionals, educators, scientists, municipal managers and corporate executives often occupy positions in which they must make decisions with significant economic consequences. They approve infrastructure projects, examine investment proposals, administer public institutions, procure technology, design social programmes and allocate budgets.However, professional expertise in one field does not automatically equip someone to test an economic model, question a demand forecast or identify unrealistic assumptions in a cost-benefit analysis. This creates a dependence on economists, consultants and other technical experts. A municipality, government department or company may appoint consultants to conduct an economic-impact assessment, feasibility study, business case or policy evaluation.The consultants arrive with models, spreadsheets, forecasts and technical presentations. Their assumptions about growth, prices, employment, demand and social benefits may determine whether a project proceeds. Yet the people formally responsible for the final decision may lack the time or analytical tools required to interrogate how those estimates were produced. The decision remains legally theirs, but its intellectual foundations have effectively been outsourced.Expert advice is indispensable in a complex economy. The problem does not arise simply because consultants and economists are involved. It emerges when expertise becomes a substitute for judgment rather than an input into it. Economic assessments are often sensitive to the choice of model, period, discount rate and assumptions about costs and benefits. Change one important assumption and an apparently objective conclusion may also change. Decision-makers who cannot interrogate these choices may defer to the authority of the expert, especially when findings are presented in intimidating technical language.In their book The Econocracy, Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins describe a society in which political and social questions are converted into technical economic problems and removed from meaningful public contestation. Questions about taxation, wages, public services, ownership and government spending come to be treated as matters that should be settled by specialists. Citizens may still vote and attend public meetings, but they enter the discussion only after experts have defined the problem, selected the available alternatives and determined what counts as a responsible proposal.A similar problem arises in industrial policy. Decisions about localisation, tariffs, strategic industries, procurement and investment incentives determine which industries receive support, which imports face restrictions, which firms benefit from public resources and where employment may be created. These choices affect workers, consumers and small businesses. Yet they are debated through concepts such as tariff escalation, local-content requirements, export competitiveness, value-chain upgrading and investment mobilisation.A small manufacturer may understand the practical obstacles to producing locally but not the model used to justify a tariff on an imported input. A worker understands what a factory closure means for a community but may not understand calculations of economy-wide welfare effects. A public official trained in law or public administration may receive conflicting reports from economists, industry organisations and importers without being able to identify whose assumptions best reflect South Africa’s circumstances.South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang has argued that economics is too important to be left exclusively to economists. This does not mean expertise has no value. It means economic decisions contain political choices about who benefits, who carries the cost and which objectives society prioritises. Citizens do not need to construct complicated economic models to ask sensible questions. What assumptions does the model contain? Who benefits from the proposed policy? Who bears the cost? Which alternatives were considered? How have similar policies performed elsewhere? Does the recommendation account for South Africa’s unemployment, inequality, concentrated ownership and uneven state capacity? Citizens do not need to construct complicated economic models to ask sensible questions. Technical language can also establish authority. Those who command the recognised vocabulary of an institution gain the power to define which arguments are credible and which can be dismissed as uninformed. Consider the difference between saying “the deficit must be reduced” and saying that the government has chosen to reduce particular forms of expenditure rather than increase certain taxes or borrow under specified conditions. The first statement presents the decision as an unavoidable instruction from the economy. The second reveals that it is a political choice with distributional consequences. Economic language becomes dangerous when it conceals such choices behind a façade of inevitability.The solution is not to turn every citizen into a professional economist. It is to provide people with enough knowledge and information to question those who use economic claims to exercise public power. Government departments, municipalities and regulators should accompany technical policy documents with clear public summaries.These should explain the available options, underlying assumptions, expected benefits, risks and distributional consequences. Public participation should not consist merely of publishing a complicated document and inviting citizens to comment on it.Economic literacy should also be incorporated more widely into university and professional programmes. Lawyers need to understand the economics of regulation, taxation and competition. Engineers need to understand infrastructure finance and procurement. Health professionals need to understand inequality, public budgets and the economics of service provision.Schools should similarly provide learners with a practical understanding of inflation, taxation, unemployment, government debt, municipal finance, procurement and industrialisation. Pupils should be taught how to read a basic budget, interpret economic information and identify hidden assumptions. Experts should advise democracy, not replace it.With the advent of democracy South Africa extended the right to vote to all adults, but access to the language of economic and political power remains deeply unequal. Meaningful democracy requires more than an invitation to comment. It also requires that people possess the tools needed to understand and question the decisions shaping their services, livelihoods and future. South Africans should not need an economics degree to understand decisions made in their name.• Mbatha is with the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. He writes in his personal capacity.